Data from varied sources drives even municipal election campaigns now

In the last 10 years, political campaigns in the United States have undergone radical structural changes. Traditional strategists are more and more taking a back seat as campaigns apply behavioural science, data analytics and field experiments using the scientific method to their ways of business.

An arms race that began with targeted mail-outs by Karl Rove-era Republicans in 2004 evolved into the 2012 re-election campaign of President Barack Obama, which employed over 40 tech developers and convened advisory committees of the world’s top behavioural and political scientists to design everything from the language of phone canvassing to online user experience.

Even as Rob Ford continues to take time off the campaign trail for rehab, these emerging methodologies are starting to impact this year’s mayoral election. With more than 1.6 million eligible voters, the city is the largest individual ground campaign in Canadian politics. And, at least between Ford’s leading rivals Olivia Chow and John Tory, it will also involve the most sophisticated get-out-the-vote operation in the city’s history.

With Tory leading among seniors, the most reliable demographic in terms of voter turnout, recent polls show Chow’s electoral success will depend in large part on the age group that has the lowest turnout rates — young voters.

Chow’s campaign, however, has one tool it hopes will influence turnout in its favour: the pledge card.

Pledge cards are used to ask supporters to sign a voluntary commitment to vote for a candidate. Their origin lies in the widely held assumption in the behavioral sciences that an individual who makes a written pledge to carry out an action is much more likely to follow through.

“We thought it would be a great way of engaging people early in the campaign,” said Nathan Rotman, who recently left his role as national director of the NDP to head the Chow campaign’s get-out-the-vote operations. “Asking people to pledge to vote for Olivia early we thought was a great way to get people to sign in and say that they’re part of the team. It worked really well in the longer campaign cycles in the United States and we are not shy about taking good ideas and looking for ways to build on them.”

While pledge cards have been tools of America’s geek left going as far back as Al Gore’s Iowa caucus victory in 2000, they were most famously used by the Obama campaign nationally in 2012.

Robert Cialdini, an emeritus professor of psychology at Arizona State University and a member of what the New York Times called a “dream team” of behavioural scientists brought in to advise the campaign, helped design the use of pledge cards during that election cycle. His research, grounded in cognitive dissonance theory, showed that by having supporters make the voluntary written pledge to vote for their candidate, campaigns could engineer additional social incentives.

Making supporters sign on the dotted line to commit is step one. Reminding them of that written commitment via text message and phone calls in the weeks leading up to the election reinforces the psychological incentive to keep their promise.

“A pledge card is a way of taking political preference out of the voting booth and turning it into an empowering personal declaration,” says Paul Tewes, the state director of Obama’s historic 2008 victory at the Iowa caucuses and co-founder of the Washington consulting firm Smoot Tewes. “Pledge cards allowed us not only to help voters overcome psychological barriers, they allowed us to take supporters and turn them into volunteers and donors.”

The language of commitment is more and more becoming recognized as crucial to effective campaigning. One field study of 18-to-25 year-olds in New Jersey, conducted for Yale University’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies in 2004, saw turnout rates double among supporters who explicitly indicated their intention to vote to a campaign volunteer over those who only identified their support for its candidate.

The digital campaign war has also become critical.

Political campaigns on both sides of the border have increasingly taken to experimenting with “microsites” – unique domains that can be structured to address issues, attack an opponent or fundraise around broad themes. In the case of John Tory campaign, they will allow for the gathering of crucial data to engage supporters.

In 2012, the Obama and Romney campaigns spent more than $60,000 combined on domain name registration and maintenance, according to campaign finance reports. With a $1.3 million spending limit, compared to the billion dollar presidential offensives, John Tory’s mayoralty campaign won’t be spending nearly as much.

But if a voter visits a Tory microsite about fiscal policy and is motivated to sign up for more information, the campaign immediately has an issues-based message to engage them.

When used well, microsites can reshape the Internet’s political landscape by strengthening the probability that citizens looking for information about a particular campaign issue will come into contact with a candidate online.

For example, one of Tory’s early microsites ranks among the top five search results for several key phrases about transit issues on Google Canada. In publishing the site and promoting it effectively, the campaign has created a unique access point to interact with voters that its rival campaigns don’t have.

“We’ve had a lot of success with our microsites,” says Tory campaign spokesperson Amanda Gailbraith. “We’ve successfully engaged with thousands of voters online about the issues they care about . . . We’re also using other tools such as surveys to get feedback from voters on the issues they care about.”

It’s a data world. Sharp political organizations, including the Chow and Tory campaigns, now harmonize the data set generated by traditional ground campaign activities — door and phone canvassing — with the data set generated by supporter activity online. A user’s online donation or Facebook “like” ends up in the same data stream as their response to a door canvasser. Postal codes make friends with Twitter handles.

Consolidating all this information into a single voter file allows campaigns to “microtarget” — speak to segments and units of the electorate on the basis of their interests and attributes. While microtargeting has its origins in commercial marketing and datamining, in U.S. elections is has helped to increase voter turnout by creating direct democracy on a large scale.

“The use of data and analytics allows us to find voters, understand what motivates them and the best way to reach them,” says Jeremy Bird, who was the director of field operations for the 2012 Obama campaign and is a founding partner at 270 Strategies.

Knowing such things as which supporters and voters come to which events and what issues they care about allows campaigns to make contact in the days following interactions. This is when research indicates they are most likely to respond positively to the campaign.

More practically, it also allows for the gauging of organizational capacity.

“A great example of this was Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe’s 2013 campaign,” adds Bird. “The campaign was able to keep track of both supporters who attended events and supporters who were actually taking action, like knocking on doors or making phone calls. This type of targeting allows campaigns to measure the capacity of volunteers and determine its field strategy based on where volunteers are and where additional recruitment is needed.“

While the Chow and Tory campaigns are using their own bespoke in-house databases to track voters, linking those databases to their online and communications tools is the same software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.

“International folks would call up,” said Michael Moschella, VP of organizing at NationBuilder, “and they would ask, ‘How do we do what Obama does?’ ”

The Los Angeles-based startup, with backing from investors including Napster co-founder Sean Parker and Facebook co-founders Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz, is one of the leading companies to come out of the post-Obama election tech boom.

NationBuilder’s software automatically converts online activity into practical datasets. It has helped to elect U.S. politicians on both sides of the aisle, including California Governor Jerry Brown and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and has recently been adopted by the UK’s opposition Labour Party.

“The more that you understand about the relationship that a campaign has with voters, the better you are able to engage them and turn the campaign into a real community building exercise as opposed to just bashing your opponent,” explains Moschella. “For example, let’s say you and I are both $100 donors, but you have 2,000 followers on Twitter and I have 200. By knowing those two things, we can figure out that you probably have a larger social network than I do and are therefore better suited to do fundraising work.

“If those pieces of information are in separate spaces or separate data streams, we both just look like $100 donors and we seem to have the same relationship with the campaign.”

Chow’s ground team, led by the whip-smart Rotman, is well equipped to turn its early enthusiasm into data that yields results at the ballot box. Tory’s voter identification drive — led by Mitch Wexler, the brainy number-cruncher who, working for Rob Ford in 2010, harnessed the data potential of the mayor’s grassroots populism by building a massive voter list from scratch — will be equally as formidable.

With Ford temporarily out of the race and consistently failing to break 30 per cent in the polls, the chance for Chow and Tory’s organizations to break their data advantage wide open is now.

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